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Living on Video

Consumers now expect even the smallest electronic
devices to come armed with the ability to play video clips. The catalyst for
the age of digital video came with the MPEG codec for compressing audio and
video information into digital format, a technology developed under the
leadership of Italian engineer and media entrepreneur Dr Leonardo Chiariglione.

Only 15 years ago, video technology was still largely based on analogue
storage devices, mostly VHS tapes for home video and Hi8 tapes for camcorders. That
video tapes appear destined to follow floppy discs into extinction is to a
large extend the merit of Leonardo Chiariglione who dedicated much of his
work life for a future in which all video technology would be digital.

Very early on, he realised that digital video would only become a global
technology if it had normative standards to ensure consistent quality and
global compatibility. To this end, he founded the Motion Pictures Expert Group
(MPEG), a council of 300 media experts from 25 countries, in 1988. Since then,
the group has established a number of the famous MPEG-standards for digitising
audio and video information.

But Chariglione was not only an inventor with profound technological
expertise, but also an active networker for the digital future. He has
consistently used his international contacts to launch initiatives promoting
digital video on a global scale. As early as 1986, he spearheaded the
International Workshop on High-Definition Television (HDTV), the results of
which are currently entering households with HD-ready television sets.

Chiariglione has also been a constant voice for the rights of digital
content creators and an advocate of fair market practices in the field. To
address some of the challenges of our times, he founded the non-profit Digital
Media Project, with representatives of networks and media corporations from 21
countries, in 2003. The Project's mission is "to promote continuing successful
development, deployment and use of Digital Media that respect the rights of
creators and rights holders to exploit their works, the wish of end users to
fully enjoy the benefits of Digital Media, and the interests of various
value-chain players to provide products and services".

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How it works

The main challenge in digitising analogue video signals is to keep the
size of resulting files as small as possible to ensure they fit on a disc or
chip and are suitable for quick streaming over the internet. In practice, the
differences between individual frames of a video broadcast are sometimes quite
minimal. Using algorithms that evaluate the differences between frames, Chiariglione's video codecs evaluate the amount of data that needs to
be actually digitised and the amount that can be "predicted" mathematically. Samples
of the current frame are compared line-by-line with those of the preceding
frame, and only the samples considered "sufficiently different" are being
stored. Today, all commercial applications of digital video encoding are based
on such predictive coding systems to save storage space.